


Long & Lost

by havuhadanosejob



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, after season 3, but it ends well, this is not a happy fic, wanderings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-11-09 23:36:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11115267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havuhadanosejob/pseuds/havuhadanosejob
Summary: Leaves from the vineFalling so slowLittle soldier girlCome marching homeBrave soldier girlCome marching home





	1. Northern Water Tribe

In the middle of the tundra, the night is immense and silent, the sky heavy with stars and endless, a black gradient of storm clouds on the northern horizon. And beyond it, behind the mountains, a column of light, emerging from the earth, thrumming and obscuring the stars.

 

A figure wrapped in dyed-blue cloth and furs, lying, caressing the sky, and singing with a clear, sad voice.

 

_ Leaves from the vine _

_ Falling so slow _

_ Little soldier girl _

_ Come marching home _

_ Brave soldier girl _

_ Come marching home _

 

The constellations she learned from the star chart found in Wan Shi Tong’s library pulse and blur and blink out over the clouds. Time to move, tread through the thick layer of pure snow, tramp through the whirling darkness. She will be forced to walk all night so as not to be buried by morning, gusts of ice threatening to carry away her heavy gear, sweep her off balance, flatten her in the frozen mounds. 

 

The urgency in her step, even through the snow and the ice and the wind, is evidence of flight. Is she fleeing? Yes, she will go to the spirit portal, she will cross to the other pole, she will leave this continent the fastest way possible. Is she a coward? Abandoning her friends, her family, her responsibilities. Leaving a trail of incompetency.

 

Go back, the winds gripping at her clothes, pushing against her, say. Go back.

 

The storm refuses to abate; the wind isn't erratic, steadily meeting her any way she turns, the snow piled up like a wall everywhere she looks. Go back.

 

Go back.

 

Maybe she should, listen and yield to what the world keeps telling her. Useless, vulnerable, hateful, guilty. Dispensable. Why not let go, let the warmth lull her to sleep. 

 

Even her own echoes sing back to her that old lullaby her mother used to-

 

No. She stills her thoughts. Focus on the sounds cutting through the deafening storm.

 

_ Come marching home _

_ Brave soldier girl _

_ Come marching home _

 

 

 

Startling awake, slumped down and half-buried, stiff, frozen, the lullaby lingers in her mind. March home. Where is home? But no. 

 

She cannot go marching home.


	2. Western Air Temple

The hall of statues is always eerily silent, the outside world only echoes, echoes from the past. She’s sitting cross-legged a little distance apart from Aang. Staring, meditating. Staring. 

 

She started her journey out of restlessness and guilt. She hopes to find patience and forgiveness here.

 

Her first moments at the temple, the calm rushing through her brought tears of relief as the incense and the winds enveloped her, her body vibrated to the echoes of the dungchen song amplified by the mountains, emptying her mind, soothing her thoughts. Distantly, she remembered the fights that took place here. Memories etched into the stone. 

 

The Western Air Temple isn’t empty now. Immense spaces filled with a newborn nation. And there, to walk in the hills again, to breathe the scent of mountain pines, to feel the air, is almost too much.

 

She breathes in hard, here in the once ruined temple, and tastes the sharp, invigorating air of the great plateau.

 

The architecture is a feat of technology. Inverted spires, ground up, winds flowing through the delicate lacework of the walls. She loves the aery isolation, hazy and diaphanous in the misty mornings, horn calls mystifying. Statues, carvings, and murals take on an ethereal quality. When it clears, the view is breathtaking, the atmosphere peaceful, joyful.

 

She relearns to breathe and smile, into the light and the laughter, seeking comfort and quiescence, pushing the pain back to the shadows. Weeks already. Playing with the lemurs and the calves, perfectioning her Pai Sho skills, consuming every last piece of knowledge at hand, absorbing the low music of rituals.

 

Everyday, she finds her way back to the hall of statues, in need of an anchor in their physical presence. The room is thick with spiritual potency, electric on her tongue, deafening, blinding, overwhelming.

 

And yet.

 

She is locked out, the lingering static taunts her, highlights her inadequacy. Can she even call it a loss when she only ever came close to brushing it from the pad of her fingers? Can you grieve for something you never truly had, someone you never fully knew, for the immensity of them, the otherworldliness, the boundlessness?


	3. Fire Nation

The light on the island has a different quality. Honey spilling from the sky, slow, thick, and warm. The air infused with the subtle spicy sweet perfume of fire lilies in full bloom, almost overwhelming in density. Drums, pipa, erhu. Singing, shouting, laughter. The Plaza is crowded in red. Fire and flowers and friends.

 

As if they weren’t all made of wounds.

 

She tries, truly, to lose herself in the festivities. She has no reason to be itching for a fight, to be angry and hard. She has no personal memories here, nothing to remind her of them.

 

But there is no slowness and constancy to anchor her. The rhythmical drumming is as erratic as the singing, layers upon layers, surrounding, bursting and ebbing, pulsating, warping and echoing.

 

All she wants is to scream.

 

And for the world to right itself. 

 

Images of immense cold empty halls occupy her mind, she fills them with her rage and her cries, echoing in her bones, muscles tightening protectively so that her temples throb and her eyes strain.

 

The sun is sinking low already. It barely lessens the heat and dampness, sweat running down her neck under her heavy hair, down her back, moistening her palms. The press of people, muggy and oppressive, dank smells mixing with sticky sweet fire lilies, makes her ill. Gentle sea winds will wash the cooking and people smells away after dark, though the festival will subdue long after, so that her walk home from the temple will remind her of Republic City from before.

 

She is late to meet the Fire Sage. In the library, she can find a semblance of balance. She is here now to learn. To find a way forward.

 

 

The room is windowless, stuffy with the fire burning, and she feels the need for expansion now, for distance. She passes the solid darkness of human shapes strewn about in the airy darkness of the streets. In her own apartment, she steps out onto the balcony, into the smell of ocean and smoke and lily. She breathes the sweet, humid, spicy air with an elation of hate, remembering the night her life devolved into fire.


	4. Southern Air Temple

The lush vegetation around the temple, the cacophony of animals and insects, the warm weather, the dry crisp blue sky belie its closeness to the South Pole. It is stepping closer to the edge of the cliff, with the knowledge that she is not in danger of falling, safe yet thrilling. A jolt through her heart.

 

Jongmu Temple, where Avatar Aang grew up.

 

Still, it’s easier than staying on Air Temple Island; at least she was never here with her—

She stops.

She goes away for a bit.

When she returns to herself, the sky is brighter and a flying bison calf has stretched out on the nearby low grass. At least an hour has passed. Maybe more.

 

Under her dusty clothes there is nothing but whalebone, plaster dust, and string. She never rests. And smiling, always smiling. For she has forgotten how to discover what she feels.

 

She never rests. The constant singing of the cicadas and the incessant buzz of the spiderflies at night. Her skull heavy, sensitive to noise and light. And smiling.

 

The temple is encased in the surrounding peaks, absent winds, the incense pungent, somber art, claustrophobic, the valleys echoing of wildlife. Meditating is dull, endless, pointless. The hall of statues is oppressing, air thick, unmoving.

 

Always smiling. 

 

 

 

She has taken to studying in the copses around the temple, where the lemurs nest. Hidden from view, shielded from the echoes of the temple. Only the low pleasant dungchen resonance nips at the periphery of her concentration. She is reading a treatise on the Scoffing Scholar of Patola, credited for one of the long-banned classics of Air Nation literature for its sophisticated and witty prose, and the controversial nature of the relationship depicted.

 

She closes her eyes on a wave of sickness and euphoria. And opens them, dazzled, crushed, reduced to nothing by this passion of grief that has lain over her whole life like stained glass, coloring everything, darkening her perceptions, and that now, with the sun behind it, pierces her with its invincible splendor. At times, the flames of a fire would seem to illuminate its design, but always the night came, all of her daily life obscuring it so that she was aware of it only as a dullness over the world. A tired, faded quality, a fatigue that made her feel as if she could not lift her earring when she was dressing for a ball. But now in the light of this glade her sorrow is clear, magnificent, profound.

 

The amusement of children, the intimacy of friends, the closeness of lovers, once soothing and joyful, grate at her insides now. She turns her gaze to the book in her hands and the words heave before her. Hunger gnaws at her belly, from envy or a real need she doesn’t care to know. She is hot, white-hot, the pressure of her seething blood pounding in her temples so that her surroundings swim and blur before her eyes.

 

She opens her notebook and leans against the trunk. Write. She learned young: writing is power.


	5. Southern Water Tribe

The white sun shines blue on the snow when she disembarks in Harbor City. The Glacier Spirit Festival will end tomorrow, the streets are bustling with southerners and tourists alike. A white hamster quivers on the snow, bloody and then dead. The fair grounds reek of nostalgia, sickening sweet cotton candy and salty popcorn. 

 

The royal feast takes place that night, in the same bare, immense hall of ice. The first one since Unalaq. She stands in the shadows of the pillars, hooded, attentive. 

 

A laugh, and when she looks up, she can see her. When she was. When she.

Her mind stops at her, like the heart of that dead hamster in the snow. Two years have passed since that day on the island and still she cannot cross the line she flung across her vision like a bolt across the sky.

 

The jolt is back, twisted, the edge right under her soles, the drop waiting for her. 

 

She puzzles over this, then feels the imminence of thought and has to fight, fight, fight to stay in the soft warm silence of thoughtlessness.

 

She recoils and curls up on herself.  She dreams of a way of remembering that would not leave a scar. She dreams of a way of forgetting that would not mean destruction, burial, loss.

  
  
  
  
  


Evening light comes through the window and illuminates her pack against the wall. Shade upon shade of gray with no color. Her thoughts are slow in the cold. Except when they’re not. Everywhere her own shadow appears, it takes the form of a woman in blues and browns. She spins, but she cannot catch her.

 

And there she is. She is lying on the bed, her face turned toward her. The air smells strongly of incense and jasmine oil. Her face pale on the pillow, her eyes sunken, accusing, withdrawn. The air pulses blue and her eyes are full of shadows.

 

She gasps, grasps, fumbles out of the bed. She is wild, feverish, desperate. She is tossing on the sea. She clings to the well-worn words of her lullaby to anchor her through the waves.

 

_ Come marching home _

_ Little soldier girl _


	6. Earth Empire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Funerals

There was a self-destructive quality to the game, a desire to tear down everything. This is what she has always told herself. Or—as she has sometimes thought—there was simply a desire for bruises, for the uncomplicated sensation of physical pain, for a pain that could be solved, unlike the suffering in the house, the servants whispering, her father sitting with his face in his hands.

  
  
  


 

But now-

 

Look at his face. This is the face he will wear until his death. A grim face, beardless, chiseled out of jasper. Every morning he washes and shaves the face. The hair grows thinner and whiter and his son is dead.

 

Look at his face, at the funeral on a hill overlooking the sea. He is not weeping, as are most of the villagers. The sea wind tugs their robes. Four young men are carrying the coffin. They are builders, strong, used to the work.

 

Slowly the light changes from the gray of a dog’s coat to the flat gray of painted metal. His profile becomes ever sharper, more rigid, more heroic. He does not weep. She does not weep either. No one speaks as the coffin is lowered in the earth, as his child is buried in silence. Everyone looks at the father.

 

Look at his face, like a blade.

 

At length, he steps forward and throws a handful of earth into the grave. He draws his wrist across his sweating forehead, leaving a smear of mud.

 

She does not weep.

 

She’s smiling, too, though, and it is a bitter, aching thing. She just can’t help acknowledging the irony of the whole thing. Didn’t want to wait for death to come for her.

 

Right.

 

Stupid, stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you.

 

Never forget what you are.

  
  
  


 

Ever since that day.

 

She had left, that day, forever.

 

Please, she wrote. Come back. 

 

“Mother, come fetch me,” whispered the girl, but no one came. She drew a picture of her hand in charcoal, a picture of her face.

 

At dawn the sky was so clear and almost green. And she felt bright and light. She always burned the drawings before she left her room.

 

Please, she wrote. Don’t come back.

  
  
  


 

She stood at the mirror, unrecognizable to herself: the narrow face, the great dark chambers of the eyes. A subtle greenness in the skin, as if it were copper exposed to the weather. The worn filigree of the lace on her expensive, unblemished gown. She felt herself becoming stranger, her loneliness irrevocable. Is this my life? Is it?


	7. Ba Sing Se

With a sudden, violent scraping, she thrust her chair backward over the stone floor and stands. The oil lamp on the table lit her face from below; the shadows made her look aged, almost a skull. “Everyone has left you,” she said in a strange rough voice. “You have chased everyone away; Some you have killed, yes, murdered; I am still here. I am still here, and I hate myself. I hate myself.”

Somehow, though her hair was carefully styled and her eyes sharply painted, she looked disheveled; something about her suggested that she had been rubbing her face, or trying to tear her hair. Her eyes glinted flatly.

 

 

 

Here was Ba Sing Se, with its courtyards, its gardens, its mighty towers, its light and darkness, always light in one place and always dark in another. She walks through the town. She walks and walks.

 

Soldiers are swarming the streets.

“Get out of the way” one says, alarmed.

“What is happening?” she asks him.

He looks up, tired, rumpled, reddened. “The general is coming.”

She thinks of how the city had seemed quieter lately—less noise, fewer revels. Shouts ring out in the distance.

“I thought it was me,” she says.

“Hm?”

“I thought it was me. The way everything’s getting quieter."

He does not understand, but is too distracted to ask questions.

But this silence is different. It is compressed tightly in a vacuum that is so vast that her spirit grows weary attempting to cross it, and so it returns to her to rest feverishly against her sorrowing heart.

 

One day, in a tall house at the edge of town, she sits in a streak of light. And suddenly she is breaking. It might be the way the light falls between the high shutters, the brown brocade in her hands, the dust, she doesn’t know, but she comes apart. Shaking, her head knocking back against the wall. Tears everywhere. The others get up, they seize her. When she can see again, she finds herself encircled. The others are weeping. Beautiful sympathy of the body.

They murmur. They stroke her hands. They say: “I know.”

She wants to say no. She wants to say, you don’t know, you don’t know us. She wants to say: my father and my friends made this war. You don’t know how we have harnessed you and murdered you and made you refugees. She thinks: For this you are cursed with monsters. And the end of it is blood. Such graceful language in your father’s book. Blood.

 

She wants to stay there. She doesn’t want to go any further. She wants to stay. She can’t remember who it was—one of the poets—who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.

All the secrets of survival in a wilderness of sunlight, wind, and chalk. And gentle from the edge of night the blue.


	8. Korra

In the desert there are empty places. Places of utter stillness, utter silence. The sky meets the rim of the world with no window, no escape. There is only sunlight, desolation, wind. The heart grows brittle.

 

A sob breaks from her throat.

She is looking at her.

 

With eagerness, with anguish, with rapture, she surrenders to the past.

 

Oh, Korra. Oh, Korra.

Korra in the rain. Korra in her room, the day they spent on Air Temple island together. Korra on a pillow, recovering from her wounds. That cold Korra with her sadness and her scars. And the earlier Korra, the teenager, wrestling, running, laughing, falling, fighting.

 

For a moment she feels herself detach from the here and now. Then she snaps back, because-

 

Her face looks devastated. Her face is like a wilderness.

 

She turns.

 

It is she who approaches. It is she who touches her. She puts her hand to her cheek. She is warm, familiar, her hair smelling of the mountains. She closes her burning, alien eyes, and now she is almost Korra, her smooth cheek a perfect fragment of the past. She sees her in her desert, her excruciating solitude. The burden of her sorrow and of her actions.

 

She trembles.

 

She has not touched her back yet and everything is lost, the world is made of fire, the seas are molten glass.

 

She sits back, struck to the heart, looking down at it. The gulf between them.

 

She’s warping like steel under uneven heat. The stresses pull at her in opposite directions, one hammer strike and she will shatter, the ring of steel thrumming loud in her ears. She must leave, she is choking, she is falling into a fit. But almost more dreadful than the noise is the absolute silence that follows, a watchful stillness tinted blue by her eyes.

 

“Asami”

 

She looks at her with the same confidence as ever and her heart cracks like a glass held over a flame.

 

The only person she’s ever lost who came back.

 

She’s drifting again, but remembering something terrible this time, and so her face is hard and grim and angry. That’s more socially acceptable than nostalgia.

 

“Asami”

 

Her father is lost to her, but Korra came back.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's how Asami travelled the world in search of the love of her life

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [contronym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/contronym) and [traeger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traeger) for beta-ing.


End file.
